


Beloved Intruder

by glacis



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-26
Updated: 2010-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:14:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/55986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glacis/pseuds/glacis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snape has a stalker. He finds evidence that someone is coming to his private rooms, yet he can never catch the intruder, in spite of his wards and traps. Then, one day...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beloved Intruder

Beloved Intruder, by seeker. PAIRING: SS/Harry Potter  RATING: NC17  NOTES: Part of the Severus Snape Fuh-Q Fest (Snape/Harry pairing)

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The first he noticed it was two years before the climactic battle with Voldemort. Everything in his life had always been noted by major events; thus, he began teaching at Hogwarts three years after becoming a Death Eater, became a double agent the year of the Slaughter, and realized he was being stalked, in retrospect, two years before the Final Battle.

He was too busy at the time to realize what he was seeing. He thought it was simply student curiosity, or the gentle malice of a fellow faculty member, or even a house elf with more daring than usual. Nothing ever went missing, but the sense of invasion bordered on violation, and if there was one thing Severus Snape no longer allowed, it was having someone violate him.

Except under orders, but he tried not to think of that.

The marks in his book were never trifled with, so it wasn't a student out to improve himself. Nothing was torn or sullied, so it wasn't anyone with a grudge. But the few photographs he kept, of his dead parents, his first lover who hadn't been a Death Eater (though he'd been killed by them shortly thereafter), himself at the ceremony granting him his Mastership, were slightly rearranged. As if someone picked them up, one after another, and studied them.

The parchments on his shelves were shifted, as if the unknown searcher had sought some more private writings, a foolish notion for anyone who knew Snape at all. If there was one thing a duplicitous man did not do, if he had an ounce of native cunning, it was keep a journal. Snape had much more than an ounce. The stalker found nothing other than students' essays, professional correspondence, lesson plans and potion formulae.

The clothing in the wardrobe was ruffled, the few, high-quality robes, fine linen shirts and woolen trousers on hangers out of alignment, the scent of cedar lingering on the air a dead giveaway that someone had been prodding about. His bureau drawers were not in their usual impeccable order, socks and pants and scarves just moved enough that the unknowing would think nothing amiss.

Snape noticed everything.

The first time it happened, he dismissed it as the sloppy work of house elves. A sound scolding sent the head elf into a faint, and Snape was satisfied it wouldn't happen again.

The second time it happened, a few months later, Snape set up wards. Perimeter alarms and invisible trip wires. When he returned from a weekend at his ancestral home, placating Death Eaters and gathering information, bone weary and needing a very hot, very long bath to wash the stench of association away, none of the alarms had been triggered. But someone had been in his rooms. He was too tired, mind body and soul, to care at that moment, but it bothered him. Itched under his skin, a problem unsolved, a mystery to irritate him.

The third time it happened was over the Christmas holiday. He'd made a required appearance at the Malfoy mansion, brooding in the corner and sneering at everyone in public, writhing and sweating and cursing as he was fucked and fucked again in private. Voldemort would have his fun, and if he wasn't physically capable, his lackeys would do. It wasn't the first time Snape had endured a gang rape with Lucius leading the pack, and he made damned sure Lucius got his turn on the bottom, but it was wearing, and the few pitiful bits of information he retrieved like a good dog for Dumbledore didn't really make up for the sacrifice. Poppy fussed at him for a little while before he escaped to his dungeons, and the smell of cedar made him curse.

Whoever was doing it was damned good. Damned good, but Snape was better. If he or she was hoping to find anything incriminating, he or she was out of luck. He stripped off his robe, dropped his clothing to the floor, stepped out of his stained briefs, courtesy of Lucius' goodbye fuck, slugged down a sleeping draught and fell into bed. He didn't wake up for sixteen hours.

When he did, he blearily noticed that his clothing was cleaned, repaired, and folded neatly on the chair next to his bed. He nodded absently, then stopped, staring at the pile. It was incomplete. His briefs were missing. After a moment, he shrugged. They must have been too mangled to salvage. Unimportant. He closed his eyes, rolled over, and slept for another four hours.

The fourth time he noticed the aftermath of intrusion it was spring. Voldemort had been quiet, gathering his strength no doubt. The students were as inattentive and ignorant as always. Dumbledore was delicately pressuring him to find out more, without endangering himself, of course ... as if every moment he pursued his double life wasn't literally mortal danger. Frustrated after another fruitless, meandering meeting with the Headmaster, Snape swept into his rooms and froze. All his boundary guardians were in place, but someone had gone through them as if they were nonexistent. Since the last time, he'd even added wards to keep the non-corporeal out, so it wasn't as if his intruder was a ghost.

Just a damned skilled wizard.

Who'd taken the sheet off his bed.

It was the first time anything had gone missing, and it was such an odd item to take Snape was inclined to blame the house elves again. Except the elves were terrified of him, and his wards would have told him if it was an elf. Snape was paranoid, rightly so, always looking below the surface. Trusting instincts that got him out of trouble almost as often as they got him into trouble, he let his eyes roam over the room and let his brain put the pieces together.

The answer his mind presented him with made no sense. Why would a stalker want something that smelled of him? There wasn't enough sweat or body oil on the sheet to be useful in any potion or spell Snape knew. He was scrupulous about not leaving anything about that an enemy could use against him, and that included everything from private writings to hair and nail clippings. So why the sheet?

It made no sense.

He was still puzzling it out in his free time months later. There were no further intrusions through the summer, but on All Hallow's Night, as he rousted amorous couples out of the bushes and tried not to be irritated out of his wits by the over-abundant cheer of the general Hogwarts populace, the stalker struck again.

As usual, his alarms gave no warning and his wards no protection. The wizard simply waltzed through them all as if they weren't there. Only this time instead of stealing his sheet, the intruder left a gift on the sheets. A thin, black, textured silk cord with a silver hook and eye at the ends. Snape sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it.

Why on earth would someone leave him a collar?

A shiver went down his spine at the realization that, whoever it was, his or her intent was clearly sexual. Yet it didn't set off his internal alarms, not in the way his usual sexual partners did, with clear warning of pain and degradation to come. It was almost ... sweet. That was unsettling.

Snape picked up the collar using the tip of his wand, muttering protective charms the entire time, and carried it safely at a distance from physical contact over to his work table. He spent the rest of the night and all the next day performing every test and spell he could think of on it, first to determine if it was benign (it was) and then to discover from whom it came (it yielded no answers). By the time he was finished the lovely silk collar was a tattered bundle of strings barely holding together. He stared at it, bewildered, then finally threw it in the fire.

Life continued as usual, though there were more Death Eater gatherings than the previous year, and his Mark ached, not the deep bone-jolting pain of a Call, more the continual background pain of a bad tooth. The students were useless, the faculty as much or moreso, and he was able to find few snippets of intelligence to satisfy Dumbledore.

The Yule Ball came and went, and Snape set up an elaborate trap to guard his rooms while he was forced to chaperone. When the festivities finally wound down and he was able to escape, he wasn't sure whether he was relieved or disappointed to discover no evidence of an intrusion. He lessened some of the energy buttressing the wards, as it was draining and he had yet to face the Malfoys, then waited to see what would happen next.

When he returned from his ritual participation in Voldemort's annual Yule mind games, weary of mind, pained in body, heartsick though he wouldn't admit it, he found another silk collar centered on his pillow. This one had a hook and eye made of worked gold. He stared at it for a very long time before he picked it up, with his hand, not his wand, and carefully placed it in the drawer next to his bed. It was no doubt a foolish thing to do, a silly thing to keep, a risk he shouldn't take, but he was tired. It was thoughtful, in an odd way. And he knew without bothering he wouldn't find out a damned thing by destroying it, so he didn't.

Again the late winter months were quiet, but Spring brought no further intrusion. Snape told himself he was relieved, although a tiny part of him wondered what would happen if he threw the collar away. Would that lure his stalker back? And why would he wish to lure the intruder back into his forays into Snape's privacy? Snape liked his privacy. Why would he want to have it invaded again?

The question disquieted him more than he liked to admit, so he pushed it away and concentrated on other things. The summer brought a flurry of Death Eater activity, and a minor revolt, as Draco Malfoy caused a stir in the ranks when he refused the Mark on his seventeenth birthday. Voldemort cursed the boy, Lucius got in the way, and in less time than it took to tell, Draco was an orphan in hiding at Hogwarts. Snape walked a very fine line during those weeks, placating Voldemort, protecting Draco, funneling information to Dumbledore, and not letting his mask slip anywhere with anyone. By the time school began he was already exhausted.

Which made his quiet enjoyment impossible to explain when he returned to his chambers after the first frustrating, interminable, fruitless day of teaching to find a single white long-stemmed rose lying across his pillow. He didn't attempt to trace it. He merely picked it up, ran a fingertip down a thorn, and allowed the resulting droplets of blood to decorate the pristine petals. When they were delicately streaked with red, he murmured a charm, freezing the rose in its fresh state, and placed it on the bedside stand. It smelt of life and death both, of love and blood, and the scent carried over into his dreams. When he woke, he was sticky with come, the sheets tangled about his legs, his mind misted with vague impressions of strong hands and soft lips.

The rose lay there. He smiled at it.

By Yule Ball, it was still lying there, and he still smiled at it before he lay down to sleep. It took the place of prayers he'd stopped saying when he was a child. There was something strengthening in it, not magical, but intrinsic, and he drew from it, sinking into his dreams and waking mentally refreshed, if physically drained. He never remembered the details of his dreams, but he knew they were the same. A gentle voice, a tender touch, a safe harbor. A strange thing, to find refuge in the gift of a stalker.

Voldemort struck just after the new year, when the children were returning from holiday. Snape had barely enough time to warn Dumbledore, and the battle was fierce. And fast, in large part because of Snape's intelligence beforehand, the preparations spearheaded by Arthur Weasley at the Ministry (behind Fudge's oblivious back) and Dumbledore at Hogwarts, and the insanity of Harry Potter. With Draco Malfoy at his back, the Boy Who Lived pulled off a magic trick none of them expected, and quite literally drained the life force out of Voldemort, trapping him in his wand then shattering both matching wands at the same time. The effort nearly killed him, and the remainder of Voldemort's ragged band would have if Black and Snape hadn't stood guard over Harry's unconscious body, allowing Draco, Lupin and McGonagall to throw a combined magical attack that felled the lot of them.

It was weeks cleaning up after, and Snape paid little attention to the state of his rooms. There were no more gifts, no more obvious signs of intrusion, and Snape couldn't help but wonder if his stalker had been one of the many to fall in battle that day. An undefined sadness, an emptiness he refused to acknowledge, grew in him.

Until the end of June, when he walked into his bedroom after seeing the last of the students leave, to find Harry Potter sitting, cross-legged, nude, in the center of his bed, holding a blood-streaked rose and wearing a thin black silk collar round his neck.

The blasted wards were still sitting there, untriggered. The alarms were silent. Harry was smiling at the rose. Then bright green eyes looked up to meet his, and Harry was smiling at Snape.

And Snape, for all his sins, smiled right back.

Regaining enough control to finally wipe the silly grin off his face, but unable to muster up his usual sneer, he asked, "What is this? A belated thank-you? I assure you, I have no need of such favors for saving your life. I would have done the same for anyone. Even Black."

Harry's smile, if anything, widened. "If it was just gratitude, d'you think I'd've been stalking you for the last two years?"

Snape swallowed, his mouth going dry as Harry shifted to set the rose back on the night stand, allowing Snape a glimpse of his swollen cock. Snape's mouth opened, and words came out, but he had no idea what they were, and from the look of it Harry wasn't listening anyway. He was too busy digging into the drawer and bringing out the collar Snape had put there. It matched the one he wore perfectly. Of course.

"What is that supposed to represent?" Snape snapped, feet carrying him closer to temptation without permission from his mind, which was slowly melting. "Some sort of twisted wedding band? What precisely are you after, Harry?" He didn't notice that he called Potter by his first name for the first time, but Harry did, and his smile softened.

"You," Harry answered quietly, and Snape stopped as his knees bumped into the side of the bed less than a foot away from naked, willing, wanting Harry Potter. It was insane.

It made no sense.

It made all the sense in the world.

His hand reached out to stroke Harry's cheek, and Harry turned his face to kiss the fingers as they passed. Snape knew that mouth. Had dreamed it for over a year. Harry's hands came up to catch him round the waist, drawing him up onto the bed, working the buttons on his robes, and Snape knew those hands, too. By the time he was as naked as Harry, he didn't care how Harry had done it, all that mattered was that Harry had. He'd patiently, stealthily, effectively breached every barrier Snape put up, slid through every ward, disarmed every alarm, and he had Snape right where Snape wanted to be.

Kissing Harry. Being touched by Harry. Tasting Harry. Being devoured by Harry. When he arched and came into Harry's mouth, he thought he'd died and ascended to a heaven he'd never believed in. When Harry parted his legs and thrust into him, and the emptiness he'd had scored out of his soul for years was finally filled, he knew why he'd never believed in it.

He'd needed his beloved intruder to teach him what heaven meant. And take him there.

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END


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